Watch out for the GMWs: Genetically Modified Women

I’ve been hoping that someone would come out and explain how this claim that women are becoming smarter than men was accomplished. I need to know the scenario and the mechanism, so I’ve developed a few of my own that I hope to see appearing soon in the Daily Mail.

  • Late at night, when no one was looking, UFOs have been abducting our women and enslaving them in the Love Factories on Mars (because as we all know, Mars Needs Women). So that we don’t catch on, they’ve been replacing them with femdroids with cybernetic brains that are very good at cheating on tests.

  • Beginning in about 1980, all female infants were selectively injected with a Communist mind control virus that turned them into soulless, freedom-hating machines who were good at gymnastics and engineering. When the time is ripe, their programming will be activated and they will rise up to overthrow Western running dog democracies.

  • The government has top secret labs where clone babies with enhanced genetically engineered intelligence are being raised. Only females are used in this project for technical cloning reasons. They’ve been swapping out normal babies in maternity wards and replacing them with these Humanity 2.0 versions for years.

  • Big Pharma has been testing brain-enhancing drugs by hiding them in birth control pills. The recent results are the consequence of clandestine human trials. Little known, related fact: they’re also doping Viagra with a stupidity drug.

  • A select team of exceptionally intelligent pick-up artists have been using their talents to inseminate a majority of women around the world, cuckolding all the dumber men, and increasing the frequency of their super-smart alleles in the population to a remarkable degree. They also all fortuitously carry a Y-dominant allele that causes defective Y-bearing sperm, so all of their children are female. Which increases the frequency of babes, schwing!

Unfortunately, there’s one little problem with those scenarios: they’re all ridiculous, requiring large-scale changes in the genetic composition of a world-wide population numbering in the billions within a few generations, and that all of the positive changes would be selective for one sex. You simply can’t argue in any coherent way that women are becoming smarter than men or that women are the smarter sex. You can reasonably say that the evidence shows that women have higher IQ scores than men now.

Because, as I’ve been saying for a long time, there’s a difference between IQ scores and the actual potential for knowledge, learning, and that general poorly defined thing we call ‘intelligence’.

What this current study by James Flynn of worldwide intelligence test scores actually shows is that a) whatever intelligence tests measure is plastic, b) the variation in those scores is not a measure of biological limitations (although I’d argue that our intelligence is a biologically human property), and c) shifting cultural environments can induce relatively rapid changes in the responses of developing human minds.

Women aren’t getting smarter. They have the same biological properties in this generation that they had in the previous generation, and the generation before that. What’s changing is a culture that allows women to slip free of sociological limitations at a young age and encourages them to practice using those brains. Their grandmothers were just as smart, but were molded in ways that limited expression of their intelligence. I also suspect that there are factors emerging which are imposing limits on male behavior and experiences — there are some troubling signs that some social expectations are imposing a new kind of stereotype threat on men.

Of course, there is some anecdotal counter-evidence. I have a daughter who went from being totally reliant on Mommy and Daddy to being an independent young woman, almost overnight. The alien pod-person/cybernetic brain implant/radical brain-enhancement doping theories do have some attractiveness.

Camille Marino is probably going to jail

Marino is a demented fanatical animal rights activist who runs a website called “Negotiation is Over”. NIO is notorious as the site of some of the most frothingly furious denouncers of all animal research. Marino is from Florida; she was arrested and extradited to Michigan in March to be tried for words she wrote on the internet.

Whoa. That ought to give one pause — arrested for free speech, you’re thinking? That does cause one’s knee to jerk.

But then she was also arrested in May when she chained herself to a library door to protest being banned from the Wayne State campus in Detroit. She’s been ordered to stay away from the researchers she threatens, but then she travels to their university to harass them — that sounds like stalking to me.

The situation here is that Marino’s got nation-wide bands of dedicated followers, those followers have in the past shown a willingness to undertake violent, destructive action on behalf of their cause, and Marino has been actively inciting others to kill researchers. You want an example? Here’s an example, and it’s also a great example of her incoherent state of mind.

The image on this page [a chalk outline labeled “animal abuser was here”] is not a cute logo. It is my personal belief that if you are a sadistic animal torturer, that is all you deserve – a chalk outline. That’s my opinion, not a threat. It’s not even inciting anyone because, unless you read my words and run out and murder David Jenstch (sic) (an idea that amuses me immensely), I’m not responsible. If you have time to think about it and form your own conclusions, my words cease being the impetus. Eh, that used to be the law at least. Who knows? Who cares? We have a job to do and that’s all that matters…. NIO is no longer mincing words. This is war!… Nothing is off limits at NIO!

…

if there are no consequences, there is no threat. If you spill blood, your blood should be spilled as well…. Some of the more high profile pacifists have said that I am “violent” and “unbalanced”. I think they finally may be right about something!

If I have my way, you’ll be praying to us for mercy!

It’s just her “opinion”, she’s not inciting anyone — she would just be amused by David Jentsch being murdered by someone who read her suggestion to go murder him. She’s not responsible, she’s just telling everyone that researchers’ blood should be spilled, and that nothing is off limits.

She’s a danger to others. It’s good news that she’s being constrained to protect the citizenry.

Pharyngula Podcast #3

We had another fun Google+ Hangout this morning with Esteleth, James Rook, Tommy Leung, and Yankee Cynic, building on a couple of articles I mentioned before. Basically, we talked about the attractiveness of the premises of evolutionary psychology vs. the extravagance of their conclusions, and the unreliability of brains and how we have to work hard to overcome them. It turned into a kind of discussion about psychology, of all things.

And now you can watch it all, too.

Isn’t it amazing how you can assemble a small group of people, give them the seed of an idea, and then they can go on to talk about it for an hour, easy?

We’ll probably do another one in about two weeks. Make suggestions! I’m also planning to do the next one at sometime in my local evening, so maybe we can bring in an Australian or two.

And everyone gets a robot pony!

Oy, singularitarians. Chris Hallquist has a post up about the brain uploading problem — every time I see this kind of discussion, I cringe at the simple-minded naivete that’s always on display. Here’s all we have to do to upload a brain, for instance:

The version of the uploading idea: take a preserved dead brain, slice it into very thin slices, scan the slices, and build a computer simulation of the entire brain.

If this process manages to give you a sufficiently accurate simulation

It won’t. It can’t.

I read the paper he recommended: it’s by a couple of philosophers. All we have to do is slice a brain up thin and “scan” it with sufficient resolution, and then we can just build a model of the brain.

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.

We don’t have a method to lock down the state of a 1.5kg brain. What you’re going to be recording is the dying brain, with cells spewing and collapsing and triggering apoptotic activity everywhere.

And that’s another thing: what the heck is going to be recorded? You need to measure the epigenetic state of every nucleus, the distribution of highly specific, low copy number molecules in every dendritic spine, the state of molecules in flux along transport pathways, and the precise concentration of all ions in every single compartment. Does anyone have a fixation method that preserves the chemical state of the tissue? All the ones I know of involve chemically modifying the cells and proteins and fluid environment. Does anyone have a scanning technique that records a complete chemical breakdown of every complex component present?

I think they’re grossly underestimating the magnitude of the problem. We can’t even record the complete state of a single cell; we can’t model a nematode with a grand total of 959 cells. We can’t even start on this problem, and here are philosophers and computer scientists blithely turning an immense and physically intractable problem into an assumption.

And then going on to make more ludicrous statements…

Axons carry spike signals at 75 meters per second or less (Kandel et al. 2000). That speed is a fixed consequence of our physiology. In contrast, software minds could be ported to faster hardware, and could therefore process information more rapidly

You’re just going to increase the speed of the computations — how are you going to do that without disrupting the interactions between all of the subunits? You’ve assumed you’ve got this gigantic database of every cell and synapse in the brain, and you’re going to just tweak the clock speed…how? You’ve got varying length constants in different axons, different kinds of processing, different kinds of synaptic outputs and receptor responses, and you’re just going to wave your hand and say, “Make them go faster!” Jebus. As if timing and hysteresis and fatigue and timing-based potentiation don’t play any role in brain function; as if sensory processing wasn’t dependent on timing. We’ve got cells that respond to phase differences in the activity of inputs, and oh, yeah, we just have a dial that we’ll turn up to 11 to make it go faster.

I’m not anti-AI; I think we are going to make great advances in the future, and we’re going to learn all kinds of interesting things. But reverse-engineering something that is the product of almost 4 billion years of evolution, that has been tweaked and finessed in complex and incomprehensible ways, and that is dependent on activity at a sub-cellular level, by hacking it apart and taking pictures of it? Total bollocks.

If singularitarians were 19th century engineers, they’d be the ones talking about our glorious future of transportation by proposing to hack up horses and replace their muscles with hydraulics. Yes, that’s the future: steam-powered robot horses. And if we shovel more coal into their bellies, they’ll go faster!

The carpenter and the pyromaniac

A very familiar story: a creationist is told that her views are unsupported by any legitimate science, and in reply she rattles off a list of creationist “scientists”.

Here we are told by a creationist housewife — as she describes herself — defending her belief that the Giant’s Causeway is only as old as the Bible says it is, a claim which assumes, of course, that there is a definite chronology in the Bible which can be used to date the age of the earth, and that this chronology, such as it is, supersedes all other forms of chronology, because the Bible is, after all, the inerrant word of God. In response to Richard Dawkins claim that reputable scientists all agree that the earth is billions of years old, our doughty housewife responds with: “That’s a blatant lie,” And then she lists four “scientists” who accept the creationist dating of the age of the earth (and she might well have named more, because, if you google these names, you end up on sites with many more).

The word “scientist” is simply a label, and if you ignore its meaning, you can stick it on anything. I’ve always considered a scientist as someone who follows a rational program of investigation of the real world, and that the word describes someone carrying out a particular and critical process of examination. But apparently, to people with no well-informed knowledge of its meaning, “science” and “scientist” are just tags you stick on really smart people who reach a conclusion you like, or who have done the academic dance to get a Ph.D. as a trophy to stick on the end of your name.

That’s a shame.

Let me explain the difference with an analogy.

A carpenter is a person who practices a highly skilled trade, carpentry, to create new and useful and lovely things out of wood. It is a non-trivial occupation, there’s both art and technology involved, and it’s a productive talent that contributes to people’s well-being. It makes the world a better place. And it involves wood.

A pyromaniac is a person with a destructive mental illness, in which they obsess over setting things on fire. Most pyromaniacs have no skill with carpentry, but some do; many of them have their own sets of skills outside of the focus of their illness. Pyromania is destructive and dangerous, contributes nothing to people’s well-being, and makes the world a worse place. And yes, it involves wood, which is a wonderful substance for burning.

Calling a creationist a scientist is as offensive as praising a pyromaniac for their skill at carpentry, when all they’ve shown is a talent for destroying things, and typically have a complete absence of any knowledge of wood-working. Producing charcoal and ash is not comparable to building a house or crafting furniture or, for that matter, creating anything.

You can’t call any creationist a scientist, because what they’re actively promoting is a destructive act of tearing down every beautiful scrap of knowledge the real scientists have acquired.

Brains and beaks

I’m always telling people you need to understand development to understand the evolution of form, because development is what evolution modifies to create change. For example, there are two processes most people have heard of. One is paedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood — a small face and large cranium are features of young apes, for instance, and the adult human skull can be seen as a child-like feature. A complementary process is peramorphosis, where adult characters appear earlier in development, and then development continues along the morphogenetic trajectory further than normal, producing novel attributes. You may have encountered examples of this in fiction: the best known are the Pak Protectors in Niven’s science-fiction stories, which are the result of longer-lived humans continuing the processes of aging to reach a novel form. There’s also the story of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, a novel by Aldous Huxley, in which a paedomorphic species (a human) lives for a very long time and develops to reach the ancestral state — a more primitive apelike form.

Just to make it more complicated, though, this isn’t to say that evolution proceeds by arresting the whole of development, turning the adult into an overgrown baby. What’s going on here is that genes that control the rate of development are being tweaked by genetic change, and there are many of those genes. There can be all sorts of mixing and matching — one organ or feature can undergo paedomorphosis in a species at the same time that another is undergoing peramorphosis.

A beautiful example has recently been published in Nature: the evolution of the avian skull. The postcranial bird skeleton can’t be neatly categorized as changes in rate: wings, the correlated changes in the pelvis and thorax, all that is a messy collection of novelties. The skull, though, can at least be broken down into a couple of key avian adaptions: brains and beaks. The cranium has gone through a set of changes with all the behavioral and sensory changes (big eyes, motor aspects of flight, navigation), while the beak has obviously diversified for different feeding strategies. The beak has changed to take over the manipulatory role lost as forelimbs became wings.

Here’s how the role of heterochrony (changes in rate of development) of different species was determined. The authors collected quantitative morphological data on a set of fossil dinosaurs and birds and extant birds for which there were both embryological and adult data. There are some straightforward observations that just leap out at you. For instance, embryonic alligator skulls have the same proportions as the skull of adult Confuciusornis, a crow-sized bird from the Cretaceous.


Similarity of embryonic Alligator and adult Confuciusornis skulls. Superimposition of Alligator embryo skull (green) onto Alligator adult skull (red, left) and onto Confuciusornis adult skull (red, right), showing the nearly identical skull configuration of the latter two and indicating paedomorphic cranial morphology in Confuciusornis.

Another common and long-hallowed technique in developmental biology is to trace a standard skull onto a 2-D grid and then determine what distortions of the grid are necessary to reshape the skull into a specific form. This method makes the stretching and skewing and compression that had to have occurred over time to sculpt these skulls from an ancestor. Here are the ontogenetic changes for different species, illustrating how they changed shape as they grew up.


Summary of ontogenetic changes in archosaur skulls; outlines on deformation grids from average. a, Alligator. b, Compsognathidae. c, Therizinosauridae. d, Archaeopteryx. e, Enantiornithes. f, Confuciusornis. g, Ostriches (Struthio).

If you can do this kind of assessment of transformations over development, you can also do it over phylogeny. Below are shown the trends observed in dinosaur and avian evolution.


Summary of heterochrony and phylogeny in bird skull evolution. emu Dromaius. Heterochronic transformations referred to in the text are A phylogenetic sequence with skull outlines set on deformation grids is enumerated with Roman numerals. Major anatomical regions involved in depicted from the primitive stem-group archosaur Euparkeria to the modern heterochronic transformations are labelled.

The coordinate system on which those skulls are mapped is a little tricky to explain. With all the numerical data available from their skull measurements, the authors did a principal component analysis, determining metrics that accounted for most of the variability between skulls. What they found were two axes of change: one is in the shape of the cranium, which exhibited paedomorphic patterns of change (although the contents of that cranium, the brain, is known to have undergone more complex heterometric change); the second was in the beak, which shows a pattern of peramorphic change.

But that’s the cool thing about this! We can quantitatively describe the plastic changes in the shape of the skull over evolutionary history as largely the product of two trends: a retention of the bulbous embryonic shape of the skull, and increased extension of the facial bones to form a beak. It’s not magic, it’s the expected incremental shifts in shape over long periods of time, in which we can actually visualize the pattern of transformation.

Now we just need to work out the genes behind these morphological changes, and their mode of action. That’s all. Hey, I think the developmental biologists have at least a century of gainful employment ahead of them…

Bhullar BA, Marugán-Lobón J, Racimo F, Bever GS, Rowe TB, Norell MA, Abzhanov A (2012) Birds have paedomorphic dinosaur skulls. Nature doi: 10.1038/nature11146. [Epub ahead of print]

Hello, Washington DC and CFI!

I’m going to be doing a bit of traveling again starting in August. I’ll be in Washington DC on the 18th, to do a fundraiser lunch for CFI-DC, and I’ll also be doing a talk later that afternoon. The talk title is “Life is Chemistry“, and I’ll be explaining why material causes are sufficient to explain this phenomenon we call life — no ghosts, spirits, souls, or magic Frankensteins in the sky to make it all happen.

Sign up for tickets now! Last time I was there they sold out.